Lotsofpeople are talking about this, so time to throw my hat in the ring. Note that this is just my idea and hasn't really been vetted by other Stack Exchange employees (probably some of them will chime in here).

Background: of "rep addicts" and "help vampires"

See this answer to "Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?". Basically, we've got a bunch of users asking low-quality questions because they legitimately need help. They haven't done their research, they didn't put in the time to create a good question, but it's still often an answerable question.

How do we know that it's answerable? Because they're still getting answers. Users who want rep are happy enough to answer these questions and collect some easy points. This is still a net win for the Internet because it's one more public artifact that might help somebody some day (and if it really can't help anybody, I still strongly believe we should close & delete it).

Take, for example, this fine post: how to get data from external url in Jquery. Is it high-quality? No, it's basically a "fix my code" question. Is it asked 100 different times every day? Yes, and it almost certainly had been asked before. Did the answerer make the Internet a better place by answering it? Yes: it's a good answer for anyone looking to solve this common problem, and it has 7000 views!

My suggestion: create a tab that filters out questions identified as low quality

We already have a low-quality algorithm that runs on new posts. It needs some work, but for now let's pretend it works and produces a moderately accurate score between 0 and 100 (0 being trash, 100 being excellent in the eyes of the algorithm). Right now we take the absolute worst of those and send them to the Low Quality Queue for review. My suggestion is to create a new tab that shows only posts with a quality score > some threshold.

The upshot is this:

Users who are tired of seeing repetitive, low-quality questions can ignore them.

Users who want to help those people or earn some easy rep can continue answering those questions.

Won't this create a two-class system?

No. Unlike other proposals:

The default will still be to show all questions, or at least some balanced combination, so everything will still be seen by somebody.

You don't have to be above a certain rep to see / participate in the high-quality questions. A new user can ask or answer a high quality question just the same as anybody else.

Questions can get upvoted into the high-quality list. If question score is an indicator of quality, one or two upvotes will be enough to bump a post up into the high-quality list.

Why not just get rid of all the low-quality posts entirely?

Because, like it or not, many users enjoy answering these questions, and there's no reason to stop them from doing so. Yes, maybe they are doing it just to earn some quick rep, but they are still helping at least one person and quite possibly the Internet at large.

We're still going to review the lowest quality posts and close / delete them. This is a second tier above that which are answerable but which some users do not want to see.

Can we actually identify low-quality questions?

This is the hard part, but I think we can. It's a reasonably straightforward Machine Learning problem: define all the features we think might be relevant, get a data set of known good posts (upvoted) and known bad posts (downvoted, deleted, closed), then train to see which features are good predictors. The features we'd likely look at include:

Post length

Capitalization

Punctuation

Ratio of code to not code

Keywords that strongly identify with low quality (misspellings, etc.)

Outcome of previous posts by this user (poor previous posts are indicators of poor future posts)

We won't get something perfect, but even if we can take an average question list from 80% low-quality to 20% low-quality that's a big win for the users who want this.

Shouldn't we be teaching people to ask better questions?

Yes! We will keep doing this via comments, reviews, and whatever site changes we can think of.

But, ultimately, I think this is just sweeping back the tide. Like it or not, people are going to ask low-quality questions. Some of them are "vampires", and some of them are just well-meaning people who don't know what they're doing (yet). This system will give some incentive to ask a high-quality question (you'll likely get a faster answer and more users will see it if it's high quality) while still allowing the askers to get answers and the answerers to get some rep.

I like this idea, create a new tab similar to interesting or featured that will hold the low quality stuff. Then if people want to see them they can go there or just ignore it.
–
bluefeet♦May 2 '14 at 21:19

10

The problem is is that this means low-quality stuff may not get enough attention to get cleaned up / downvoted / closed early enough.
–
Martijn PietersMay 2 '14 at 21:31

40

This is still answering the wrong question. "Did the answerer make the Internet a better place by answering it? Yes: it has 7000 views!" View count does not necessarily imply quality. How many of those views represent someone who found an answer to a specific problem by viewing that question? Can view count tell us that? No matter how we fiddle with the ways we display questions, the bad ones are still a problem.
–
George CumminsMay 2 '14 at 21:31

3

@MartijnPieters I would think that the low quality stuff should still be filtered into the low quality review queue.
–
bluefeet♦May 2 '14 at 21:36

7

@GeorgeCummins, view count is far from a perfect heuristic, but given the fact that they almost all come form Google, and the ways Google assesses things (essentially trying to determine whether the searcher kept looking or got what they needed), it's pretty reasonable to use it as our best indicator of how many people are benefitting over time.
–
Jaydles♦May 2 '14 at 21:38

4

I'm just glad to see someone is thinking of a solution that isn't separating posts by user rep!
–
codeMagicMay 2 '14 at 21:42

8

Personally, I would prefer to this this implemented as a "hide / don't hide" switch, rather than having a literal 'tab' to house low-quality content. That just seems like an unusual use of screen real estate... and a bit of an overkill for what its purpose entails.
–
Robert Cartaino♦May 2 '14 at 21:43

10

Then again, If this were presented as more of a "posts needing help" feature, that might frame this in a more positive light rather than suggesting the community should simply forget (hide) this stuff. <thinking>
–
Robert Cartaino♦May 2 '14 at 21:51

4

Regarding "Can we actually identify low-quality questions?", whatever happened to the results from this competition: blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/08/… ? Was that at all useful in identifying bad questions?
–
Brad Larson♦May 2 '14 at 22:39

@DavidFullerton instead of the term "rep whore", how about we use something less offensive but still descriptive like "rep addict", with the connotation of drug addicts who will do anything to get their fix?
–
CupcakeMay 2 '14 at 23:40

34

If we're going to let people gain rep for the sake of gaining rep, I think it's high time we stop using rep as a primary measure for determining when and to whom to award community privileges. Fine, let those people answer low-quality questions when they get through, but if we hand them review privileges and they go letting every future low-quality post through, then there's not much of a point in system quality checks or bans or even votes anymore.
–
BoltClock♦May 4 '14 at 4:27

10

I'd like to see rep being used for what it originally meant: "how much the system trusts you". Works as well for users asking questions. Fairness is important, can't think of anything more fair than getting exposure proportional to how much a user gave back.
–
Hans PassantMay 5 '14 at 17:42

7

@Mkalafut This is actually the intention. Part of the reason why the new user experience is so poor is because experienced users are tired of all the low quality stuff. So they are either ragequitting, or are taking out their anger on the new users. By providing an optional filter, these experienced users can choose not to see the low quality stuff and thus will no longer need to take it out on the new users. (At least that's the goal. How it may actually work out may be different.)
–
MysticialMay 5 '14 at 21:34

3

The desired end result is that we retain all the valuable experienced users. The new users, who used to be constantly attacked by the angry experienced users, will get their questions answered by those who want to answer them.
–
MysticialMay 5 '14 at 21:45

9 Answers
9

I like the idea of being able to filter on something other than score. And I really like that you're proposing a way to feature questions we think might be good rather than a ghetto for questions we think are bad.

Our existing quality-score heuristics are... not that great; 100 doesn't reliably mean much beyond "isn't one paragraph of screaming". But, we haven't really changed them in several years either, while the nature of problematic posts likely has (huge code dumps have their own check, but that should probably feed into the score as well). Making this easier to adapt to new problems (or new sites...) would be a valuable addition all on its own.

Some initial thoughts on using a beefed-up quality score to offer a "cream of the crop" view:

Make it obvious. An explicit tab on /questions, /tags/<tag>, etc. is good; a search option or hidden URL isn't.

Making this a privilege accessible by folks above 10K might be a nice reward for sticking it out that long.

It might be worth telling folks who post low-quality stuff that... Well, they're posting low-quality stuff. We already tell folks when we block their questions, but a lot of mediocrity slides by at just above the block threshold. Yeah, the vampires ain't gonna care, but the minority who are interested in learning something might benefit from hearing "Your question is sad-looking and will likely be ignored by experienced answerers and then downvoted".

Give folks a way to report feedback. Besides voting, I mean. If I'm in The Stack Overflow VIP Room and come across cruft, it'd be nice to report that to the system immediately rather than hoping it guesses that my downvote means something.

I wonder what might result from making a quality filter a 10k privilege vs. a standard feature.
–
samthebrand♦May 2 '14 at 22:19

28

Not sure about making it a privilege but I agree with everything else
–
David Fullerton♦May 2 '14 at 22:20

38

Why on earth 10k privilege? I got frustrated with tons of crap that flow through here when I had 1k exp already, and now you want to punish me for giving up hope? I would really enjoy being able to check out only valuable stuff, maybe my love & respect for SO will come back because of that.
–
Michal SzyndelMay 2 '14 at 23:34

12

I really like the idea of warning users their questions are perceived as low quality. Those who aren't interested in improving will quit, and anyone who is would take the message seriously.
–
David RobinsonMay 2 '14 at 23:56

2

I think the idea behind a priviledge, was to give incentive to get rep, and to prevent everyone from switching. But if there are people that want to answer such questions it is not a problem. I also don't see a real reason for it to be a reward. People do not need more incentive to get reputation. People need reasons to stay and not loose fun from participating. Maybe the 10k bar is high, there is 60k users with +200rep, and 5k with +10k, not sure if this too much elitist or not. I think something like being able to set the filter bar higher with more rep is better idea than all or nothing.
–
luk32May 3 '14 at 0:02

7

I see no reason to put it behind a rep paywall.
–
staticxMay 5 '14 at 16:50

16

I have to agree with @MichaelSzyndel the torrent of crap is one of the reasons my engagement level is low enough that I'm unlikely to ever get anything near 10k rep.
–
Dan NeelyMay 5 '14 at 18:27

1

There are 5598 users with 10k reputation which is only 0.18% of the Stack Overflow user base.
–
AmicableMay 7 '14 at 8:43

4

I have been telling @DavidFullerton for a while that the ask page needs a massive revamp, and showing low quality warnings (and suggestions on how to fix) would be a huge and welcome improvement to a page that really hasn't fundamentally changed much since about 2009...
–
Jeff Atwood♦Jun 4 '14 at 5:15

I agree with the rep paywall, but it should be more like 100 rep rather than 10k.
–
MehrdadJul 6 '14 at 19:50

You get +100 rep for signing up for any other SE site, so that's likely too low.
–
GerratJul 23 '14 at 17:10

Overall I believe this is a great idea except for the way in which you identify a low quality post. You rely heavily on grammar - English grammar. Many SO users have very poor English but try their best to build a high quality question. In my eyes, this will be the downfall to your algorithm. For example if quality is on a scale of 0-100, and a question has 10 sentences. None of the sentences include capitalization and you subtract 1 point for each; that is -10 points. The question is easy to understand but just includes these meaningless mistakes, but could easily add up to be placed in a low quality queue.

On this page (stackoverflow.com/help/why-vote), it says "..fails to communicate information.." on the reason for a downvote. If you can't communicate and I can't understand you because of bad grammar, capitalization, or punctuation, you are getting a downvote.
–
staticxMay 5 '14 at 16:58

3

You failed to understand what my post said. I did not comment on whether or not you can interpret what a user posted, it is the way the algorithm will interpret grammar. A grammar mistake that a person can understand (such as capitalization) will be marked down with an algorithm; and I disagree with that calculation.
–
Jordan.J.DMay 5 '14 at 17:00

3

I understood you completely and my point still stands. The algorithm tries to think like a human. And in this case in terms of bad English, it's a low quality post that would likely garner downvotes by a real human.
–
staticxMay 5 '14 at 17:01

2

So you downvote people when they do not capitalize the first letter of each sentence?
–
Jordan.J.DMay 5 '14 at 17:04

12

Yep, I downvote low quality posts all the time, or if the post is not useful, or doesn't show adequate research. Most people feel that way. It helps separate the chaff.
–
staticxMay 5 '14 at 17:05

1

From your same link: "Voting up a question or answer signals to the rest of the community that a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful", you argue that a post is not interesting, well-researched, or useful if they forget to capitalize stackoverflow?
–
Jordan.J.DMay 5 '14 at 17:09

2

It depends on the context. As you wrote it there, no. You are debating a strawman. My argument is backed up by many meta posts and we need to stop enabling people.
–
staticxMay 5 '14 at 17:11

2

"You rely heavily on grammar - English grammar. Many SO users have very poor English but try their best to build a high quality question." - Downvote. End of discussion. It's low quality. I didn't miss your point. That's how it happens outside of an algorithm
–
staticxMay 5 '14 at 17:14

2

I read the rest of the post.. As you can see, you received two downvotes so far. I am not the only one disagreeing with you. There is a lot of crap out there that needs more downvotes. We shouldn't enable bad questions. Also, your retort makes no sense. The quality scale you propose already occurs in downvoting. They are not meaningless mistakes... Users need to take the time to write quality posts or find somewhere else to go.
–
staticxMay 5 '14 at 17:17

4

I don't really know how else to explain it so I will try it using the comment you posted. My point comes down to the fact that small mistakes can and will add up to having an otherwise high quality and interesting post moved to a low quality queue because of an algorithm that does not know how to handle a post. So for instance, your previous post includes the word "downvotes" twice; downvotes is not a real word (-2). When using ellipses (you did twice) there should be space before and after the ellipses (-2) and the word after the ellipses is not capitalized (-2). So is your post low quality?
–
Jordan.J.DMay 5 '14 at 17:27

11

I agree, we need to be careful of this. The algorithm is really going to be based on what has already been marked as bad via downvoting, closure or deletion -- if that has a large number of misspellings and typos, then that will show up in the algorithm. I suspect what it will identify is suspect keywords like "help" or similar. No one signal will determine the quality of a post -- it'll take all the factors into account.
–
David Fullerton♦May 5 '14 at 18:41

3

The simple fact is that not being able to speak English well is going to correlate (rather strongly) with lower-quality questions. That doesn't mean that there is "no way out" for non-native speakers; if voting score (both of the current post and historically for the account) is properly weighted in the heuristic, then there shouldn't be any issue. Ask a good question with subpar grammar, get upvoted, get quality-scored highly. Seems self-correcting enough to me.
–
roippiMay 5 '14 at 21:27

6

I'm not going to do very well on our Portuguese site either. That doesn't mean I'm a bad person, it just means I can't write high-quality Portuguese. Plenty of smart, otherwise-competent people can't communicate effectively using English - that's not a reason to hate them, but neither is it a reason to give them a pass when effective communication in English is necessary.
–
Shog9♦May 6 '14 at 21:55

6

I understood Staticx s comments that he downvotes perfectly prepared question just because OP is not native speaker and did some grammar mistakes. That is very ugly.
–
Leos LiterakMay 7 '14 at 11:32

2

Correct capitalisation (or should that be capitalization? do I get a downvote?) should not be a large factor in the algorithm, and nor should other grammar pedantry. I agree that some degree of checking for the clarity of a question is valid. OVER CAPITALISATION aka shouting should be penalised. And so should too many exclamations, emoticons or other unnecessary punctuation!!!! PLEASE HELP stop this sort of thing in questions!!! :-)
–
AdamVMay 14 '14 at 12:07

Additionally, with the semi-separation, people might not really know where the line between low quality and should-be-closed is, so they stop reviewing.

High quality might suffer because low quality fills up the review queues and less reviewers, unless we separate that too.

(Optional) These low quality people upvote each other, making actual low quality posts classify as high quality, largely defeating the point of running. We either (eventually) push the threshold up so high that there may as well not be one, or we're basically back where we started.

New users are primarily exposed to the low quality, which presumably will have way higher quantity. The low quality shows up in search engine results all the same.

Stack Overflow's public image suffers heavily.

The low quality possibly eventually gets so bad that we just get rid of it.

... and then you realize that's what you should've done in the first place.

That's assuming the algorithm works like a charm, otherwise:

High quality posters continue leaving.

Quality continues to drop.

Stack Overflow becomes Homework Overflow.

Homework Overflow and the like were dismissed pretty quickly as bad ideas (and I agreed), but this sounds like a worse idea to me personally. They really don't belong on the same site, if for no other reason than public image - it's not particularly likely that someone will know about this separation right off the bat. If that person has primarily been exposed to the low quality he/she will believe Stack Overflow is low quality and won't join (or, if there's a reputation requirement, as Shog suggested, maybe they know about it, but don't think it's worth it to try to get that much reputation first). Thus there wouldn't be an influx of high quality users, thus the high quality content would decrease and slowly die off.

... or maybe I'm just being overly pessimistic. I blame too much exposure to low quality content.

Meh, I'm more optimistic. You can always mix in high quality stuff when showing questions to new/anonymous users.... Moderation as it is currently done on SO is the most hated and misunderstood aspect about the site and I'm super tired of both the overzealous closing and the resulting "OMG youre all such Nazis" complaints. So let's stop it and concentrate on the stuff we want to see and let groups 2 and 3 have at it instead of fruitlessly trying to police them. In theory at least, it sounds great
–
Pekka 웃May 6 '14 at 5:15

1

@Pekka웃 We can mix in high quality stuff (I was assuming we would), but low quality will have the numbers, which drives away good visitors - seeing the occasional good Q&A on Yahoo Answers, for example, wouldn't even remotely convince me to participate there. This change would be adding more misunderstanding and hatred to the review queue IMO. For me personally, there are plenty of instances where I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between these 'accepted' low quality questions and unclear / too broad / insufficient information / typographical error (which should be closed).
–
DukelingMay 6 '14 at 15:31

but it would be easy to display a 50%/50% mix between everything as it comes in, and high quality voted questions. Or even 75%/25%. That sounds like a solvable problem to me and not a fundamental argument against David's idea. And the policing doesn't work as it stands. The home page already looks a bit like Askville.
–
Pekka 웃May 6 '14 at 15:32

@Pekka웃 Let's say it's 90% LQ and 10% HQ (as a guess, but perhaps I'm overestimating LQ, or the HQ standards won't be as high as mine). At 50/50, we'd only show someone 11% of the LQ stuff. So the average LQQ would get very little exposure and probably go unanswered (if you think there's a lot of Qs slipping through the cracks now...). And perhaps more significantly is what shows up in search engines - I have a bad opinion about Yahoo Answers because of what I've seen from questions I got to from Google results - I don't think I've ever browsed questions from their site.
–
DukelingMay 6 '14 at 17:03

1

I think what everyone (except maybe David) is missing here is that beyond a certain point the quality of the question doesn't really matter: it's all about whether or not the question attracts quality answers. Questions are all sand, and most oysters - answerers - aren't gonna produce pearls. The trick is finding a way to pair the ones that will with the questions that'll actually make them want to - which I suspect has a lot more to do with novelty than anything else. There's where things like crap titles, code dumps just get in the way.
–
Shog9♦May 6 '14 at 21:29

One possibility to try to 'fix' the questions as they come in could be to break up the question form. Instead of having one text box that people can puke words into, there could be a few, named with parts a good question needs. Instead of just being title and question, there could be title, description, code that causes it, what is indicating the problem, What you have done to fix it, then finally, a short sentence or two reiterating what the actual question is.

After getting submitted, each section (this would be easiest), could just get compounded into how questions are now.

For example:

Title:
Calling printf in assembly is seg-faulting

Description of problem:
When I call printf in x86_64 assembly (using nasm), I get a seg-fault somewhere in printf (Says gdb).
I think I'm just using printf wrong, but I'm not sure.

Relevant Code: Your code causing the problem (or just where you think it is):

This could go even as far as making people think filling out each area would be necessary (even though It wouldnt be, as some questions wouldn't fit these guidelines), and nudge people to actually try and solve the problem themselves.

It could be a first, (some think much needed), of possibly many, steps to get SO back to good, helpful questions.

Interesting suggestion. My worry is that this is really targeted towards a user who means well but doesn't know how to write a good question. I suspect that the users who just "puke words" into a question will just ignore whatever guidance we give them and continue to paste their code wherever there's a box.
–
David Fullerton♦May 15 '14 at 15:02

@DavidFullerton I guess this is sort of guidelines, but unlike the page on how to post good questions, it is (forcibly) present while the question is being written. While it isn't the optimal solution, it would be harder to ignore or remain ignorant of while asking a question.
–
ShadeMay 15 '14 at 23:48

Wait, wait, I'm not talking about a beginner checkbox, specifying difficulty, or anything like that.

Much less "let's spend a few months tweaking an automatic filter" and much more "let's make some changes and roll them out", and automatic filters will likely either have too many false positive, or too many false negatives, regardless of how much time is spent on them.

(This is an attempt at a more manual process - while I have something more idealistic in mind, I doubt it will work well / get accepted by the community. Feel free to suggest your own more manual process)

Give users a "What have you tried" textbox when asking a question.

Make sure to indicate that this is optional.

Make sure that we specify that this is for concrete evidence - something as vague as "I looked around and couldn't find an answer" should not be tolerated.

This could come with a couple of other advantages:

Users will be more inclined to show what they've tried. This is useful, if for no other reason than to put a few of us at ease to help.

Separation of what you've tried and the actual question. This tends to make for a way more useful question.

What's written here could just be appended to your question (separated by a line?).

If this text box is empty, it will automatically get classified as low quality.

In order to prevent users from just figuring this out and classify incorrectly to prevent getting classified as low quality, incorrect classification should be treated as an unforgivable curse one of the worst things one can do on the site.

Some automatic rules.

Any of the following can classify a question as low quality:

A few downvotes (and no or few upvotes).

A history of low quality posts by the user.

The title - we have word-based filters for titles, which plenty of people agree are a horrible idea - why not just classify these as low quality instead? How many people do we think have actually changed their (planned) question significantly after just being prevented from using some title?

The problem is not only a signal/noise problem but also a scaling problem. With the number of new questions rising to 8000 a day and everyone seeing all the question, even if the SNR stays constant you'll see more noise.

So one possible way of better adapting to large number of questions is not showing every new question to every user. This is the main idea of this answer but it needs to be adapted.

It must be completely optional, it should not include valuable (upvoted questions) and it should be described by a small set of transparent parameters.

The following proposal might do the trick:
An optional filter that says: Show me only XX% (randomly drawn) of all questions (or with the following tags YY) with a score below ZZ.

This means everybody can by himself reduce the number of low quality questions that he/she sees. And it's completely optional.

This might not be the perfect separation of low-level crap and desired questions, which is hard anyway, but it might make a difference for those who are frustrated about the high number of perceived low level questions.

This answer is about better filtering to reduce the SNR while still allowing homework questions. The question that also should be answered is if homework question in general are accepted if they are in a reasonable form. I also remained with the votes metric since it is already there and it is user made (so we are familiar with it) and I'm not sure something else is better.

The underlying problem is that the SO community has grown to include people that it shouldn't have. A community is defined as much by the people it includes as by the people it excludes.

The goal of creating a good SO is perhaps noble, but I don't think the robot screen will get you there. Treating new people badly actually reduces the quality of new members. Just like forced signups, tutorials, or extra checkboxes reduce the quality of new questions.

New people asking bad questions should be kicked out instantly. People who have someone who vouches for them should be slightly harder to kick out.

by account age in days

and also

by account rep.

It's just that obvious.

Just have two trivial filters at the top of any/all pages, account days age and account rep. So simple.

Note, there seems to be a concept introduced here of some "other" way to identify author quality (and/or question quality). Other than a Commander-Data -like AI system, this is not sensible; it just seems to be a vapour-ware talk.

Someone at SO just click to add the two filters mentioned here. Try it for a few weeks.

Information wants to be free.

if a normal company like Google was running this site, obviously, it goes without saying, there'd be little click-buttons everywhere so the viewer could just filter on whatever you want. Nobody would even think about the issue. If one of the junior programmers on the team happened to think of even more ways to filter ("phase of the moon!" "geolocation!" whatever..) they'd just click to add that. This site has always had a weird "social engineering" vibe; the site constantly tries to make people act how the site wants. (This is neither good nor bad, it's just a business decision, a reality.) In this case it's "totally silly", obviously there should be a filter button for the number discussed here.

This proposal isn't exactly the same. From what I've read around on Meta, SO tries to make distinctions based on the question, not on the user. This reasoning is part of the reason why the close reasons were revamped, and to be honest filtering by account seems counterproductive to getting future experts to join and contribute, when they know that their excellent questions would be likely drowned beneath a sea of bad questions.
–
user3580294Jul 18 '14 at 3:06

Yes, this is hard to do. I'm not going to deny that. but the "concept introduced here of some 'other' way to identify quality" is what accounts for the difference in voting between this question and the one you linked to. Filtering by account age/rep is easy, but it isn't right in the long run.
–
user3580294Jul 18 '14 at 3:10

Can we get a "This is a beginner question" checkbox on the Ask Question page for this too?

I know I see a lot of posts prefixed with some form of "I'm a beginner..." and these are usually the type of duplicate/low-quality posts that users using this filter won't want to see.

Users that are new to a technology frequently don't know what they should be Googling for to figure out what they want to do, so often its much faster and easier to ask a question on Stack Overflow than to go through an entire tutorial or all the documentation on a language/technology to find exactly what you're looking for.

The reason I like this idea is because it lets the question asker choose to place their question in with the "low quality" posts. There are many users who would gladly do this so they don't disturb the "experts", with myself being one of them.

These are exactly the type of questions that we don't want on the site at all. If someone isn't even willing to do a web search to find the answer to a question that is already well documented, it doesn't belong here. If we had such a checkbox, the only way I see it adding value is to automatically close any question that uses it.
–
ServyMay 5 '14 at 16:43

7

@Servy I know that's how many in the "meta crowd" views it, however I disagree and I am answering this based on David's question, which establishes that there are many beginner-level questions which do help others and can contribute to "making the internet a better place".
–
RachelMay 5 '14 at 16:46

5

Sure, there are questions of a low difficulty level that can be good questions. Someone just not bothering to do a web search on the topic isn't one of those cases. If a question is of great quality, and just isn't very hard to solve, there's no reason to separate it. Most of the top experts have no problem helping out people with somewhat easier problems, so long as the question is good. They're interested in filtering out bad questions, not filtering out easy questions. Someone asking a question who can't be bothered to search google first isn't "making the internet a better place".
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ServyMay 5 '14 at 16:49

@Servy Well I would have agreed with you some time ago, but the option to vote close for "not understanding the basics" was removed. Also, this very question is an incentive to accept low-quality questions, because "people want to answer it". I am not saying the "beginner question checkbox" is a good idea ... I was personally thinking about a tag, but I feel like it's a bad idea. I get the feeling people would abuse it in many ways. It's too opinion-based what's beginner and what is not. However, I wonder if your statement, that "we don't want such questions" is true.
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luk32May 5 '14 at 16:53

@luk32 The close reason for having not being able to understand the answers given was removed not because the close reason itself was wrong; it is in fact still a valid reason to close a question. It was removed because people abused to to close questions lacking effort, rather than questions to which the author clearly wouldn't be able to understand the answer. The fact people want to do other people's web searches for them doesn't make the questions any more appropriate here. Lots of people want to answer questions that don't belong here. That doesn't mean they belong here.
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ServyMay 5 '14 at 16:56

1

@Servy So why there is no option to close because "This is explained in the documentation. The question can be answered by directly citing documentation." or similar? There is also no close vote for lack of effort. Only downvote. I do share your opinion about quality. IMO it's better to put lack-of-effort question on hold rather than down-vote it. I just wonder if this is the official course the site has.
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luk32May 5 '14 at 17:00

4

I don't think the checkbox is needed either, but I do think @Servy is misunderstanding the difference between an asker who has tried searching - but has so little knowledge he is just not searching using the correct term - and someone who doesn't bother to search. They are both asking how to accomplish a task, but one is looking for top-level guidance while the other wants every detail to the point they have their code done for them.
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DoubleDoubleMay 5 '14 at 17:11

3

@Servy Actually, I was thinking of people who know how to do something in one language, but don't know the correct way to do it (or terms to Google for) in another one. I often have questions like that, as some technologies are fairly interchangable as long as you understand the basic logic, and I tend to jump into projects that use other languages often. I've edited my post to try and clarify that.
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RachelMay 5 '14 at 17:45

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@Rachel The number of people in that position is fairly low, because most developers who have learned a few languages have learned how to find the answers to their problems, and so don't need to ask yet another SO question about that one question that is asked every single day because they know how to find the answer for themselves.
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ServyMay 5 '14 at 17:48

3

My version of finding out how to do something in another language: Google it and click on the first Stack Overflow link I see. I've gotten to the point where I bypass most other answers because I know SO is where I will find what I am looking for. And when I don't find a SO link in the first few Google pages containing what I'm looking for, I want to post a question. I would love a checkbox like this on the [Ask Question] page, and think other users would appreciate it too based on the number of "I'm a beginner please forgive me if this is a dumb question" opening lines I see :)
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RachelMay 5 '14 at 17:53

5

Excellent idea. These are precisely the ones we want to filter out. The form that I often see is "I'm a beginner so please don't downvote me or close this question". If they can effectively downvote or hide themselves, it saves me the trouble of doing so.
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David WallaceMay 5 '14 at 18:17

4

I think the problem with this that this would give users an excuse to post questions without researching; which is not what users on Stack Overflow want. No one learns from a "do my homework for me" type of question, and the community should stay away from letting users post those type of questions to benefit as many people as possible.
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Jordan.J.DMay 5 '14 at 19:05

11

For every over-sensitive college kid offended by someone else's ignorance, there's someone else with 30 years of experience who'd rather help teach the newbs than risk having to work with them untaught. I'm not concerned that beginner questions will go unanswered; I'm concerned that hard-working beginners who take the time to write clearly are being buried under a flood of nondescript questions from folks who see SO as little more than a crowd-sourced debugger.
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Shog9♦May 6 '14 at 21:32

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SO has become a mechanical turk for write my code for me/design my application so I don't have to, and don't explain it, I just want the answer, I don't actually care how it works crowd, and that isn't what the original intent was, far from it!
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Jarrod RobersonMay 7 '14 at 2:34

2

+1 I wonder why this has received so many downvotes... I love the idea, but maybe this checkbox should be a different kind of vote instead. There are so many easy question, which are hard for someone even when trying hard. Marking a question as easy would leave enough people to answer it, when it was possible to filter based on difficulty.
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maaartinusMay 23 '14 at 2:09